Bridging the vocabulary gap for EFL medical undergraduates: The establishment of a medical word list  

Oleh:

Hsu, Wenhua

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Teaching Research (sebagian Full Text) vol. 17 no. 4 (2013), page 454.
Topik: British National Corpus (BNC); lexical coverage; medical word list; vocabulary levels
Fulltext: Language Teaching Research-2013-Hsu-454-84.pdf (784.6KB)

Isi artikel

This study created a medical word list (MWL) to bridge the gap between non-technical and technical vocabulary. The researcher compiled a corpus containing 155 textbooks across 31 medical subject areas from e-book databases (totaling 15 million running words) and examined the range and frequency of words outside the most frequent 3,000-word families along the British National Corpus scale. To reach 98% lexical coverage for adequate comprehension of medical texts, 595 of the most frequently-occurring word families in the corpus were ultimately chosen and formed the MWL, and these accounted for 10.72% of the tokens in the medical textbooks under study. Excluding highly-specialized medical terms of Greek/Latin sources, the MWL encompasses various sub-technical and lay-technical vocabularies. It is suggested that with the help of free online concordancers, medical teachers can raise their students’ awareness of the commonly-used medical words reported in this study by incorporating concordance data into teaching materials, thereby consolidating the vocabulary knowledge acquired from the MWL. For medical novices, the present MWL provides a window to the medical register.

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